fine whine

Even since Carina wrote about 43 Things I've wanted to make a list of my own on the site. It offers people a very simple interface for making a 43-item to-do list of sorts*, and easy access to items and lists from other members. It took me some effort and thought, but I too have written my 43 things.

I've even begun working on some of them. This one is rather specific but still one that I want to do. The 43things site lets me add updates and even pictures to show what I've done.

What I'm doing, I should explain, is making the wishlist feature of online DVD retailer DeepDiscountDVD more usable. The way it works on the site is this: you add discs to your wishlist and then email the list to the people you hope will buy them for you. Other wishlists, such as the ones Amazon offers, are pages available online that link back to the site and can be accessed and updated easily without spamming people with more emails.

So the script I've created so far takes the email from DDD (which is sent to a mailbox I've created just for this), scans through the titles and links, and grabs DDD's cover art image links, and links those to the pages to buy the discs. My next steps are to cache links, so that I'm not hitting DDD's servers many times to get the same data, and to create some sort of presentation better than just the cover images.

Then again, it does look neat with just the pictures. Check it out.

* Other 43-item list sites provided by the creators are 43 Placess and 43 People. They are all linked together by userid and equally easy and fun to use.

I've been playing with POV-Ray again, making 3d models and rendering them. It's the program I used back when I was rendering LEGO models, and I had even used it for a college class to make some very impressive prototype mockups, but I haven't touched it in over a year and thought I was getting rusty. The POV-Ray Scene Description Language isn't exactly difficult, just complicated.

I write it all by hand, of course. Figuring out how to easily turn primitive shapes and solids (cones, spheres, boxes, planes) into interesting objects is just half of the challenge: the other half, of course, being the typing them in without making too many mistakes part. There are programs out there that can do it all visually on screen, all CAD-like and cool, but that's just not my bag, baby.

So what was my project this time? Pac-Man. I wanted to be all authentic, so I tracked down an arcade ROM* and a program to emulate it (thank you XMAME) and then set out in my quest to have a pixel-proportionate copy of the game screen, minus the titular character and ghosts.

Well, for now minus them. They're not exactly so complicated that I couldn't duplicate them with some more simple shapes...

So this is what I have, more or less. The key is turning it into something cool.

* Actually the ROM I ended up using is the original Japanese Puck-Man, but when Namco brought the hallowed game to our shores somebody smart noticed that the name (in big bold letters on the side of the cabinet) could very, very easily be changed to something not quite appropriate for an arcade full of impressionable kids.

Incidentally, I wasn't really ever that big a fan of Pac-Man. I never played it in an arcade. We had it for the Atari 2600 (say what you will about that not being a true port, it was the best we could get) but it was the first, and only, game cartridge that has ever died. Pac-Man has brought me little but trouble all along, I guess. The reason I ended up with Puck-Man was that I was having some minor difficulties with XMAME reading the correct pacman.zip, so I gave up and went with what worked. It's the same game anyway.

I done a baaaad thing.

Originally uploaded by mikelietz.

Here's what a flash of inspiration, an hour of perspiration, a third of a roll of masking tape, some black paint and a white t-shirt can make. I assembled all of the materials last night, and here's what it turned out being.

If you don't know what it is, I'm not telling. Yet.

(Incidently I'm trying out this new-fangled flickr automatic-posting thing. Overall, I'm still not sure what to think of it.)

There's this tradition going around, of making lists of things that people want to change at the beginnings of new years. I usually throw a couple out here or there to maintain polite conversation, and these are probably no better.

• I want to eliminate the "have"s and "got"s out of my conversations when I mean things like ownership and necessity. This means no more "gotta", too.
• I want to maintain a list of things that I'd like to receive, instead of just thinking and acting like I already own everything that I could possibly want.
• I want to burn over one hundred fifty thousand calories in activities above and beyond my ordinary sitting and walking around.
• I want to finish constructing my shelves, and make at least a design for some sort of desk-based solution for my computer room. I want to begin construction on a model railroad in my basement.
• I want to keep better track of the books I read and the movies I watch. I keep score on the movies but not the books, and darn it, I'd like to know. I also would like to make a better stab at qualitative lists of the best and worst ten or so.

I'm tempted to come up with some CGI tracking for some of these, and could probably call that a resolution or goal or whatever too, except that it takes me an average of three years, start to finish, for any CGI application more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. I'm trying to stick to listing ones that I might actually be able to keep (you may have noticed also the conspicuous lack of "I want to update this in a more timely fashion").

But, whatever. They're just made up goals anyway.

Well, I have failed. I had good intentions to write my NaNo novel but never got around to making that a reality. I could list off a whole bunch of excuses starting with disenfranchisement from the election and continuing on with the whole lack of an overall plot until the twelfth, but really I never had the motivation in the first place for the sci-fi novel I'd planned about killers from the fourth (spatial) dimension. I chalked up 3446 words before giving up completely, most of that in protracted expository dialogue (and I typed another 1359 words of notes about the book).

Hoping to salvage the month, three days ago I began work on another novel, one nearer and dearer to my actual life. This time around I came up with 14,703 words (no notes, though) of musings on my life as of late, particularly about my dreams. I meant dreams in both common definitions of "nighttime imagination things" and "hopes and aspirations", and I wrote out a lot of personal stuff, briefly and occasionally fictionalized, about those topics. I talked about jobs a lot, and also a bit of my childhood. It was pretty good stuff, and I'll likely post parts of it somewhere here on my website, eventually. There are a lot of misspellings and other errors in there, though, since I typed almost all of it on my Palm with my fancy new keyboard.

I must admit that I really like typing on my Palm. It's just such a neat idea, and the keyboard never ceases to amuse me as an example of really good engineering. If ever I am faced with another typing assignment I'll probably forego the computers altogether and use this instead, I like it that much.

As for the next Nano, I intend to try again and win it. I have another year to prepare, and this time I think I'll make an actual outline, instead of a paragraph for the first section, another for the last, and some ellipsis dots between them. Failing that, I'll hack the contest. The last good idea I had before stopping thinking about Nano altogether was to write a Groundhog's day scenario wherein a good amount of the action is repeated and thus the text could be duplicated. Of course the devil would be in the details, particularly the ones that set apart the iterations, but creativity should help that. I thought I'd have this happen to a small group of people (researchers in deep space or current-day rogue scientists not unlike Michael Crichton's guys in Timeline), one or two of whom would have a sense of deja vu each time but never the same ones. The protagonist(s) would have a tough time getting persistent information in such a scenario and the solution would need to be clever. I could even go about doing this thusly: write a story to the best of my ability and divide its eventual word count into 50,000 and repeat as necessary. So it's sort of cheating -- I'm willing to give it a shot if it pushes me out of short story territory once and for all.

This is not to say that I've had a month of bad writing. I'm slowly catching myself up on the daily updates, and some of them are worth looking back upon, I think. For me, at least. After all, I wrote some five thousand words on this page for the month, so can I count those too? That would just about push me over the half way mark if I combined every word I typed in the month, I think.

Well, there's always next year.

Back when I was planning out my PTO I'd picked today as the token day to finish out my novel. I had no way of knowing then that by the time I would reached this day I would have already given up on writing not one but two separate novels. This is in fact the case, as I posted on this Nano forum post, excerpted below in its entirety for those who do not want to read the rest of the conversation or are merely too lazy to click links:

I've decided to throw in the towel. I lost motivation about midway through the second day, plugged along with a couple hundred words of easy expository dialogue here and there until the 12th when I had a late night revelation of what I thought was a plot. I furtively wrote it all down (I wasn't at home nor near a computer) but in retrospect it's really only the skeletons of the beginning and ending. I'm missing the whole middle.

So I wrote nothing until Thursday the turkey day, when I conceded that a book I didn't care to write would be tough to make someone else care about reading, and I started over with a very slightly fictionalized account of my life, and where I am with careers and dreams and whatnot.

I milked a good 14,000 words out of that before losing steam, and today I am throwing in the towel. Last year I wrote 48,000 words about not being able to write, but this year I don't feel like mustering the effort to do those other 30,000 (if I keep the fourth thousand words I did for "Killers from the fourth dimension"). I'm sad to do it but unless I cheat I can't win this year, and it's a big step for me that I'm not going to try to cheat, I think. After all, I usually resort to cheating in video games before I give up.

I didn't care enough to even name my protagonist. For that matter I didn't even use a placeholder: I merely referred to him exclusively with personal pronouns.

Moreover I did consider cheating. What a hollow victory that would be, to claim that I'd won a contest judged on the honor system with no prizes other than personal satisfaction and individual pride. I could've easily found fifty thousand words to post, as I had already sized up the words I'd posted here this month. I even considered tracking down all the emails that I'd sent and replied going back to the first, but before I got too far along that shady path I saw the wisdom of my ways and posted my concession. I'm disappointed with myself and feel very defeated, but I'll move on easily enough, I think.

I have a much greater respect now for the people who succeeded in writing not only novels this month but novels in general. For now I think I'm a short story author. Do I even have a novel in me? We'll know next year, I guess. Time to play some video games and start the deluge of library reserves that have been stored up for the whole month, I suppose.